This is a series of wisdom and mystical knowledge that will be examined... This knowledge will show the hidden teachings of Rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef also known as Jesus the Christ but will also include esoteric knowledge from the Mystics of all religions and philosophies...
All of these Mystics will ask you to find the ' Source of All ', and to ' Know Thyself '... Enter into the most important experience of your life...

ANTHONY: You or I cannot, of our own will, bring about a condition known as enlightenment. That is an infinite knowledge. Only a sage can do that because only a sage himself is infinite knowledge and can produce an infinite result. But you and I as finite psychological beings cannot.

No matter how intensely the ego thinks about the Over-self, the best that it can do is come up with another thought. Whereas if you sit next to a sage, what can he do? He can stop you from thinking, slow down the mental processes, and you could experience that infinite consciousness. So the sage could bring that about, whereas my ego can't bring that about.

My ego cannot produce this infinite consciousness. The best it can do is: "I have another thought—infinite consciousness, infinite knowledge." It can go on doing that forever, but never bring about its own cessation, whereas the sage can do that. He can produce this infinite result, this infinite activity, this infinite knowledge. Because the experience of your Overself, or the glimpse of it, is infinite. It is an experience of infinity.

I remember thinking that when I ‘woke up’ my troubles would all be over and that people would recognize that something had ‘happened’ to ‘me’ and that I would instantly become a teacher to other people. Hahahahahaha….the ego-mind makes up funny stories, doesn’t it?! Ordinary life goes on.

This morning I rediscovered that what ‘waking up’ really brings is Nothing. No inner life at all, rather Inner Silence without effort, no boundaries with ‘the rest of it,’ no permanent ‘self’ at all, no recognition, and No One to care. I could say that inner silence is ‘blissful’ but, that doesn’t exactly describe it. Nothing does.

The condition of ‘being awake’ has, of course, nothing to do with the ego-mind at all. It’s about walking around as The Absolute, and knowing there is actually nothing else being perceived but, The Absolute in all of its various forms, and in its conditions Beyond Form, Energy (Dark or Light) and Matter (Dark or Light). From an Absolute point of view, I could say that Nothing ever happens, and there is No One else here at all. “I” don’t exist at all, and so Nobody can or does love a “me.” Nonetheless, love is everywhere that The Absolute is recognizing Itself. A lovely paradox.

May all who read this ‘wake up’ in this lifetime: it is possible! Happy Solstice and Happy Holy Days (Holidays)

-Jonathan Labman‎ to Adyashanti - Enlightenment and The End of Your World

Please take what Im saying here not as some intellectual rant, but as an invitation to look into your own experience.

It may be best not to buy into the idea that True Self/Awareness has certain attributes or that you are acting directly from True Self/Awareness. New age spirituality and some nondual teachings sometimes erroneously assign these things to True Self/Awareness.

True Self/Awareness is simply that which is perceiving or that to which everything is coming and going.

Assigning attributes to True Self/Awareness or believing that it has a certain voice/action is at best, a belief, and at worst, dangerous.

For example, there are stories of people who committed suicide by believing that a thought that said suicide was a good idea was coming from True Self/Awareness.

Although that is an extreme example, there are other reasons not to assign attributes to Awareness or claim that your actions are coming directly from it.

Many teachers who have abused students have used the idea that their actions were coming directly from True Self/Awareness as a way to rationalize bad behavior. I've worked with people in relationships who were at the receiving end of partners or friends who justified their hurtful behavior by claiming that it was coming directly from True Self/Awareness.

Also, when one believes True Self/Awareness is inherently peaceful or blissful, there can be a tendency to regard any negative state as coming from ego while the positive states are coming from True Self/Awareness. This can create a constant seeking to GET BACK to the positive state ("I got it, I lost it" syndrome) as well as an avoidance of and resistance to negative states (bypassing).

Notice that when you are at peace or even experiencing bliss, it is mostly because there is no resistance to what is arising to awareness. It's all being accepted as it arises. It's not because True Self/Awareness is inherently peaceful or blissful. It isn't inherently anything.

Even when you are experiencing something negative or non-peaceful, awareness is still there. It's that to which the negative thought/emotion is happening.

This is a more mature view, IMHO, because it allows for everything - every positive, negative or neutral thought, feeling, or sensation, state, experience - to be as it is. It helps to end seeking and bypassing, which by their very nature come from the movement of chasing the positive and avoiding the negative.
And ironically, it provides more peace, acceptance and even bliss, but even those states come and go to awareness

The world looks just as it did before; being understood for what it is--a thought-series--does not alter its appearance.

The sage's perception of it is like other men's; his senses function like theirs; but he knows that his experience of it depends on the ever-presence of Consciousness; he is never without this awareness.

The Overself does not always play the part of a witness however. Still and unmoving though it be, nevertheless its presence para­doxically makes possible all man’s activities and movements.

In a broad sense it is not only the hidden observer but also, by virtue of its being a function of the World‑Mind, the inner ruler of the person.

Thus it arranges the karma of the coming incarnation before birth, for it contains all his karmic possibilities out of the past, and it is the secret actualizing agent which passes them down into time and space for his ultimate progress.

At critical moments in the personal life it may suddenly and dramatically interfere by engineering unexpected events or by imparting a powerful urge towards a certain decision. This also is an act of grace. In the result the man is super‑rationally guided or miraculously guarded.

Ego believes it has agency and that it’s doing things, and constantly things happen that the ego doesn’t want to happen. In fact, the ego itself does things that it doesn’t want to do; yet it insists that it has agency. Strange, isn’t it? We bump into that over and over, even in one given day.

You hear it at retreats, like this: “How do I not have this thought? How do I not have this feeling?” As if you had agency. If you had agency you wouldn’t have to ask the question, would you? If we had this so-called free agency we’d just go, “Well, I don’t want to think -- click. I feel bad, I’ve got free agency, I don’t want to feel bad -- click -- I feel good.”

We think the enlightened ones figure this agency thing out. They’ve got total agency, so they can choose bliss, joy, and happiness, and they’ve got something figured out, when actually it’s just the opposite. They’ve realized just the opposite: There is no agency.

Ego has no agency, therefore it has no freedom. That’s why it’s constantly frustrated; that’s why it constantly lies to itself. It keeps pretending that it does. It would be terrible news if we were our egos -- because that would mean we are locked into a prison we could never get out of. But of course an ego is just a collection of thinking based on desire and aversion.

That vast unified field of being -- whatever we want to call that: pure consciousness, spirit, unified field -- as that gets more and more conscious, as that wakes up to its own nature, the experience as it gets very deep is that “Whatever is happening is what I want to be happening.” Because when you are only that field, you haven’t split yourself off; there’s only the One.

(a) Awareness alone is whatever it turns its attention to, seems to exist at the time: only that.

If to Void then there is nothing else. If to world, then world assumes reality.

(b) What is it that is aware?

The thought of a point of awareness creates, gives reality at the lowest level to ego, and at the highest to Higher Self but when the thought itself is dropped there is only the One Existence, Being, in the divine Emptiness.

It is therefore the Source of all life, intelligence, form.

(c) The idea held becomes direct experience for the personality, the awareness becomes direct perception.

Ringu Tulku Rinpoche says:
"In the word ཡེ་ཤེས་, yeshe, ཡེ་, yé is short for ཡེ་ནས་, yé né, which means ‘right from the beginning’ or ‘primordially’. Some people translate it as ‘pristine’ or 'pure', meaning that it is untouched and unstained, and has been there all the time. But I think we can say that yeshe is the most natural (wisdom) state of our awareness or consciousness (shespa), which is unstained, uncontrived and completely ordinary. It is there all the time, but we don’t recognize it.”

Yeshe knows itself as being differentiated from karmic self-consciousness and the conceptualizing mind (sem).

The primordial awareness, yeshe, is that consciousness which is not dependent on any prior causes or conditions. It can’t be created through practices, insights or study.

It is the famous “Wisdom Eye” as the “third eye” between and above the two human eyes, it is that “eye of awareness” which “sees” thoughts, mental, images, day dreams, night dreams and all sensory perceptions. The “eye” doesn’t ever change or become the effect of what is “seen” or known.

It is what is already “seeing” or knowing as our capacity to know and experience..

It is permanently in the condition of nirvana, while “perceiving” the samsaric phenomena of karmic mind and karmic self.

It’s never obstacled, blocked or obscured. It has no intention to alter, modify or to transform its experienced displays as seen or as experienced.

Just reading this is enough to shift consciousness from being the “seen” to being the “seeing”.

All that is limited by form, semblance, sound, color is called object.
Among them all, man alone is more than an object.
Though, like objects, he has form and semblance,
He is not limited to form.
He is more.
He can attain to formlessness.

When he is beyond form and semblance, beyond "this" and "that,"
where is the comparison with another object?
Where is the conflict?

What can stand in his way?
He will rest in his eternal place which is no-place.
He will be hidden in his own unfathomable secret.
His nature sinks to its root in the One.
His vitality, his power hide in secret Tao

(1) It is not the tyranny of the ego which is to be removed most of all--although that is a necessary part of the Great Work - nor is it that the ego must be uprooted and killed forever--although its old self must surrender to the new person it has to become.

No--let it live and attend to its daily work but only as a purified being, an ennobled character or quietened mind, an enlightened man--in short, a new ego representing what is best in the human creature.

He will still be an "I" but one that is in harmony with the Overself - a descriptive name that ought to be kept and not discarded. So do not in your writings attack the ego as so many do, but lift it up to the highest possibility.

(2) The teachers increase daily and ask others to follow them. The teachings multiply and the books about them too. They are not your concern. Let them do their very much needed work. But you are to enter a new and different rhythm and tell such as will listen that they need not be forlorn, lost, or without hope because they find none to appeal to their heart or mind.

They are asked only to follow the God within themselves, for "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." P.B. - give this message while giving all proper respect and honour to the teachers of today and yesterday.

Those who feel alone in this matter or who can only walk outside the groups on an independent path should be reminded that there is a God within them who can guide and help them if they turn to him.

The caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, dies to its old form and can never go back to being a caterpillar.

Yet, if you look closely, the main body of it still retains its caterpillar form.

Recognize that you are an ego and do not pretend to have wings by using non-duality jargon.

You intuit the source within; now offer yourself in deep surrender as ego incarnate to the fire of grace.

It is this fire which burns away all that is exclusive and leaves in its place a refined personality under the sole sovereignty of Non-Conceptual Truth, which makes the will of the individual the will of the One.

This life is all a dream,
a dream within a dream.
We dream this world,
we dream that we die
and take birth in another body.

And in this birth we dream
that we have dreams.
All kinds of pleasures and suffering
alternate in these dreams,
but a moment comes when waking up happens.

In this moment,
which we call realizing the Self,
there is the understanding that
all the births, all the deaths,
all the sufferings and all the pleasures
were unreal dreams
that have finally come to an end.

"The original attitude of the American Indian toward the Eternal, the 'Great Mystery' that surrounds and embraces us, was as simple as it was exalted. To him it was the supreme conception, bringing with it the fullest measure of joy and satisfaction possible in this life.

The worship of the 'Great Mystery' was silent, solitary, free from all self-seeking. It was silent, because all speech is of necessity feeble and imperfect; therefore the souls of my ancestors ascended to God in wordless adoration. It was solitary, because they believed that He is nearer to us in solitude, and there were no priests authorized to come between a man and his Maker. None might exhort or confess or in any way meddle with the religious experience of another. Among us all men were created sons of God and stood erect, as conscious of their divinity. Our faith might not be formulated in creeds, nor forced upon any who were unwilling to receive it; hence there was no preaching, proselyting, nor persecution, neither were there any scoffers or atheists.

There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature. Being a natural man, the Indian was intensely poetical. He would deem it sacrilege to build a house for Him who may be met face to face in the mysterious, shadowy aisles of the primeval forest, or on the sunlit bosom of virgin prairies, upon dizzy spires and pinnacles of naked rock, and yonder in the jeweled vault of the night sky! He who enrobes Himself in filmy veils of cloud, there on the rim of the visible world where our Great-Grandfather Sun kindles his evening camp-fire, He who rides upon the rigorous wind of the north, or breathes forth His spirit upon aromatic southern airs, whose war-canoe is launched upon majestic rivers and inland seas -- He needs no lesser cathedral!

That solitary communion with the Unseen which was the highest expression of our religious life is partly described in the word bambeday, literally 'mysterious feeling,' which has been variously translated 'fasting' and 'dreaming.' It may better be interpreted as 'consciousness of the divine'."

AH: That fact, that the ego no longer has that kind of blind security in its own autonomy, leads to this long drawn-out process.

ANTHONY: Yes. You have to remember that even if no books were ever written, and there were no gurus, no teachers, no sages, no texts available, no companions to talk to, this still operates. It's a natural process. It operates regardless of whether you have flags flying, books written, or not. This is what I mean when I speak about life reaching out through experience to understand itself. And this is independent even of the cultural mores of the environment. This is a natural process. An apple or a pear on a tree ripens naturally. You don't have to go there and read to it about the genesis of the process of its growth, budding, and maturation! [laughter] It just happens. And the pear has no notion that it's Norwegian or Finnish or American, or anything like that.

AH: Some of the mystical experiences that I've read about use the expression "I am not" rather than "I am a grander self." It seems that the notion of a grander self is the conclusion of the philosophic work.

ANTHONY: Yes, it's a very long drawn-out path. But the important thing to understand is that this is a process that's going on in nature. You can be born on an island with nobody to talk to. Everybody would be carrying a stone weighing two hundred pounds and you wouldn't be carrying any.

It is consequently from its own Overself that every individual receives the world‑picture.

We have pointed out in earlier books that the Overself has its human habitat within the heart.

Although associated of course with the whole body it has its most intimate association with the heart.

Just as a king’s rule may extend over a whole country and yet it may also be said to be definitely centered in the palace where he resides, so the Overself permeates the entire body and yet is also definitely centered in the heart.

Hence the heart is the focal point where the World‑Mind through its intermediary the Overself affects the personality.

The karmic forces become active within the heart therefore and there break into space‑time existence.

Like light‑photographs on a sensitive film, they develop into a tiny seed‑like thought‑form. This is the matrix of the world-to‑be.

Were this to remain here, then the individual would experience it only in the form of a dream.

Indeed, in an earlier period of cosmic evolution such was the strange way in which the immature human race did pass its existence.

What almost all Western minds can’t grasp, is that goal of the Madhyamaka and Prasangika emptiness teachings, is the natural and spontaneous (not intended) CESSATION of all conceptualization and mental “grasping for meanings” through thought.

This is like “thinking and conceiving” a rope to be a snake.

When the lights are turned up, it’s seen there is no snake; the snake was a mental construct imputed upon the rope.

Then, the mind naturally ceases thinking “snake”. You don’t have to practice “not thinking about that rope being a snake”.

That is how the natural cessation of conceptualizing occurs too; the mind sees ALL thoughts and concepts are fictions being applied to sensory phenomena (more concepts) or to other conceptual constructions.

You can’t think or cleverly conceptualize your way to nirvana.

Nirvana is already fully present and is known when all conceptualizing naturally ceases.

It’s what remains, but the mind has been too busy chasing and grasping for insights through thought, to notice.

Anything added to what I just shared is just more karmic mind-noise expressed as concepts. What did the Buddha wake up from? His own daydreaming in thoughts and concepts.

There is nothing to do. When you look deeply you will see that most “doing” is reaction. Pure motiveless observation alone is empty of reaction for there is nobody to react. Then every action is spontaneous from moment to moment.

[Long silence]

You must not come to any conclusions in this kind of meeting. The speaking is more or less a pretext. The real perfume is in the silence.

The monks and ascetics glibly use this word but their sense of its meaning is not the same as the philosopher’s.

It does not mean that we are to prefer being well‑emaciated to being well‑nourished. It does not mean that we should deliberately choose dirty hovels in which to dwell, uncomfortable chairs in which to sit, ill‑paid menial work by which to earn our livelihood or poverty in preference to pros­perity.

And it certainly does not mean that we are to turn our backs on wife, child, parent, friend and social status. Those who say it does mean these things make the mistake of confusing different levels of ethical reference, of propagating for universal practice a moral attitude which is perfectly right for themselves alone, perfectly right for men who have outwardly renounced the world and become monks.

All such public advertisements of piety, however, leave the philosopher cold.

He practises non‑attachment by understanding the transiency of all things and there­fore by refusing to look for permanent happiness in this mundane sphere, by ever keeping at the back of his mind and in the inmost recess of his heart a secret reservation against dependence on any earthly thing or living creature for final happiness.

He will take the best that this world offers him, if he can, but at the same time he is fully prepared to take the worst. For he knows the real nature of the world and puts his ultimate faith in That where no person and no formed thing can dwell. He is, in fact, really attached only to one thing ‑ the Overself.

The sage finds that the world without—the externally manifested idea of the world—is one's own inner self That's quite advanced.

There are mystics who have an experience, a glimpse, of their own higher self, and they become recluses and hermits; they run away.

But there's another kind of experience that some mystics have where they feel the sacredness of every-thing around them.

They become acquainted with the fact that the World-Idea being manifested in them is also of the nature of the "I" It can actually occur that you come out of a trance state like that and bump into a chair and say, "Excuse me"; you actually feel the sacredness of the whole world.

This is not common for most mystics. At any rate, PB is pointing out here that these are shortcomings that mystics have.

First of all, it's not a continuous light; it flickers; even worse, it goes off and goes on again.

So the insight that the philosopher operates with is continuous, uninterrupted, without any break.

The philosopher continuously sees that consciousness underlies the reality of objects.

"If we are to discuss this matter, the simple fact is that there is nothing whatsoever to point out to people.

If there were anything at all to indicate to people, Buddhism would not have reached the present day.

For this reason the successions of Buddhas extending a hand and the successions of Zen masters passing on transmission have done so for lack of practical choice; there has never been an actual doctrine."

That which never dies and was not born, which has existed from one eternity to another, can exist only in a timeless Now which is beyond human conception but not beyond human experience. He who can learn to live feelingly in this everlasting Now knows how artificial are all those oppressions of time to which humanity clings so slavishly and so short‑sightedly.

He knows that these divisions which it insists on making are mere conventions which help to make practical life possible but which are illusions in the greater absolute life of Infinite Duration. The passive submission to time keeps man enchained. The willed meditation on the infinite observer which is ever with him and within him is a revolt which weakens every link of his chains.

If the unimaginably stretched‑out time‑life of World‑Mind is beyond human reach the timelessness of pure Mind is with­in possible experience. As the Overself it is the stupendous ever-­present fact of his life. If he ceases to ignore it and repeatedly strives to know it, the hour will certainly arrive when he shall do so.

For gently and gradually a realization will come to the student that he is no longer imprisoned by the body, that an inexpressible spaciousness of being is now his. The planetary scene will seem like a shadow show. The people in it will seem like shadow actors play­ing allotted parts.

He himself will feel fleshless and ethereal. A queer feeling that this is an experience he has been fated to meet since birth will creep into his heart. He will find in himself the wonderful confirmation of that which reason merely affirms and religion only hints at ‑ the glorious fact of the timeless soul.

When the inter‑connectedness and inter‑dependence of all ex­istence is grasped, the quest of a purely individual salvation is seen to be an illusory one. I am to be saved not for my own sake alone ‘ but because all are to be saved: this is the proper attitude we ‘should adopt.

We can now begin to understand what Jesus meant when he uttered the words: “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it.”

For this wider self, which was the Christ‑principle in Jesus, is the secret thread which ties man to man. It also offers the scientific basis of Jesus’ beneficent injunction: “Love thy neighbour as thyself.”

It lives in the ‘I’ as the latter itself lives in the body. We can begin to understand too what Paul meant when he pronounced that truly mystical sentence: “I live, yet not I but Christ liveth in me.” The Overself is indeed the Cosmic Christ to which we are silently called to dedicate our lesser existence.

Humanity’s ongoing progress towards the collective awakening is amazing! You are all doing a most wonderful job in assisting in the divine plan, just as you promised, contracted, and intended before you incarnated. Many of you have been following very difficult and demanding paths, filled with pain, anxiety, poverty, and, of course, suffering. You volunteered from the generosity of your loving hearts so that all who choose to awaken as the divine plan comes to fruition would be ably and lovingly assisted to do so. You are all receiving enormous assistance from those in the spiritual realms, but, because the density of the physical realm is so heavy, vast numbers are also reliant on the help provided by all of you, Light bearers and Light workers, to enable them to fulfill their divine destiny.

All are One, therefore, whatever anyone does affects everyone else! All who are presently incarnate – over seven billion people of myriad races, colors, and creeds – are on Earth at this moment because they volunteered to assist in clearing from humanity all that is not in complete alignment with Love. Some of you are calling it the clearing of core issues, and that is truly what it is, the core issues of fear, bitterness, resentment, and hatred, that have been leading you into conflict for eons. Those of you consciously doing this are doing it not only for yourselves, but also for those who have totally forgotten about the contracts they made to do this before they incarnated. And, at a deep level below their human awareness, those who have forgotten are, nevertheless, clearing an abundance of those issues, and your presence amongst them vitally increases their ability to do this.

There is no one on Earth who does not have issues to clear, because the game of separation you have been playing has been very intense and violently competitive, and everyone has been playing. This clearance is extremely healing for you as well, because, as many of you have noticed, the heaviness of three dimensional life does lift, giving you more energy and motivation, as issues are brought to the surface of your awareness, acknowledged, and released.

There is only Love, and It’s constant presence provides a vast healing energy for all who choose to turn to It by releasing their hold on righteous beliefs and behaviors, thus removing the blocks and obstructions that have closed off Its access to their hearts. All hearts will open to the divine field of Love that embraces them, allowing It to heal them, bringing them comfort and joy on a scale they have never before experienced as humans. And this is only the beginning!

God’s Will for you, for all conscious beings, is eternal joy! You were created from Love and in joy because God creates joyfully for the pure joy of doing so, and His Will is that you do the same because he knows what immense joy it will bring you. He created you like unto Himself to utterly delight in all of creation as He does, because to be fully alive is to be joy-filled, and that is the state He wants you to experience as fully as He does. His Love for you is boundless, and he wants you to know that by experiencing It in every moment of your eternal existence. That is all that He wants for you, and, truly, It is everything.

You are free, just as you were created, and God requires nothing of you. You do not need to do good deeds, pay Him obeisance, or seek His approval. He offers you His unconditional Love in every moment, knowing that It is what, as humans within the illusion, you are constantly and desperately seeking outside yourselves where It cannot be found. It is within you, where He placed It at the moment of your creation, and that is where you will find It. Seek not the distractions of the illusion, however alluring they may appear to you to be. Go within, and there you will find Yourself and God eternally at one with each other in joyous harmonious relationship from which nothing is lacking.

There is NO SEPARATION! You are as you were created, One with God. No other state exists or could exist, because God is All, and therefore, so are You!

The illusion is an infinitesimal distraction from Reality that you made and on which you have focused almost your whole attention for eons, so that you have indeed been mightily distracted by it from Reality.

Now it is time to mightily enlarge your attention and awareness so that you recognize and acknowledge who You are, the eternally beloved child of God, without Whom God would be incomplete. That, of course, isimpossible. What Is is unchanging and eternal, It is God and You at One in each other’s Presence forever. A timeless state, because there is no time, there is only now, the eternal now, and that is where you are in every moment of your existence, as you will most joyfully remember on your awakening, NOW!

What is meant when it is said that the Overself is man’s higher individuality must now be explained.

We know that the World ­Mind must be everywhere yet it is certainly not everywhere to the personal consciousness.

There must be a point‑instant in space-­time perception where the latter can meet it. In most mystical ex­perience such a point is first felt to exist within the heart.

But the World‑Mind cannot be confined within such a limited percep­tion. And later mystical experience always transcends this centre within the heart and largely detaches the consciousness from the body altogether.

Yet the finite self can never bring the World ­Mind in its fulness within this experience simply because finitude would itself merge and vanish while trying to do so.

This mystical meeting‑point, the Overself, represents the utmost extent to which the finite self can consciously share in the ultimate existence.

It is that fragment of God which dwells in and yet environs man, a fragment which has all the quality and grandeur of God but not all the amplitude and power of God.

The intellect is a tool, a tool for biological survival and adaptation.

The intellect is concerned with registering, classifying, naming, recording all the events that a person experiences.

We began to see that it is the very nature of the intellect not to be able to deal with the kind of formless thinking that the Overself works with.

If left to its own devices, the intellect would not be able to think its way out; it will always be in a cul-de-sac; it will always be caught in that realm.

Something has to come in and start guiding the intellect, in the sense of manipulating thoughts to produce certain concepts which further your understanding.

This is a process that keeps going on, and there will be many obstacles because there will be all kinds of interferences on the part of the ego.

But what the Overself has to do—which is the World-Mind working its understanding of itself out in you—is to guide those intellectual processes until there's a fulfillment, until there are no more questions.

When the questions stop—and PB says this has to happen naturally, not because someone tells you or the doctrine insists—when the questioning has been fulfilled, all the doubts answered, there comes a cessation of the thinking process itself, because now the experience of that reality must be grasped, and that means that the intellect must stay in abeyance.

"While "sangha" usually refers to a spiritual community associated with a particular tradition or religion, people who make up our sangha are from various backgrounds—Buddhist, Hindu, Christian. The spirit of our sangha is a mutual interest in the exploration of spiritual truth outside of the context of a particular tradition, religion, or teaching. There is an openness to it. These teachings seem to resonate with those who want to get to the real core of spirituality and are looking beyond exterior trappings for a more unencumbered expression of Truth.

Our sangha is, of course, made up of people who are interested in my teaching and the way it expresses itself. But my viewpoint is that I’m not really into me; I’m into the Truth. The teaching is pointing to a more universal Truth and toward an experience of sangha that is beyond all the particular expressions or forms that Truth can take. To me, real sangha is whatever is in service to the silence of the heart—wherever it shows up.

One of the most beautiful inquiries is, “What does my life serve?” This is a big question. It’s not asking, “What form is my service taking?” It doesn’t particularly matter what form our service takes when we are serving the silence of the heart. The only thing that’s important is, “What is my life really serving?”

All of us are servants, are we not? From the cradle to the grave, in some way we’re a servant of something. We can be a servant to many things: our minds, our desires, our fantasies, our ideas, our beliefs—and we’ve all been in service to all of those at some point in our lives. When we have some awakening to Truth—to what we actually are—then there is an opportunity to be a servant of that. When we realize what we are, we can serve what we are—instead of serving what we aren’t. To me this is what real sangha is.

What does it mean to be in service to the Truth right now? One of the most wonderful things about this sangha, and also one of the most challenging things about it, has been a continuous exploration of what it actually means to serve the silence of the heart—not only individually, but collectively. What does it mean to be in service of the Truth when one of your buddies woke up on the wrong side of the universe that day? What does that look like? It’s always asking us to put our realization into practice, into movement, into motion, into this world that will forever be perfectly imperfect.

Serving the Truth becomes our life instead of just an isolated event. It takes the abstractness out of spirituality. That’s the opportunity of real spirituality: to be in service to the silence of the heart."

The personal ego of man forms itself out of the impersonal life of the universe like a wave forming itself out of the ocean. It constricts, confines, restricts, and limits that infinite life to a small finite area. The wave does just the same to the water of the ocean.

The ego shuts out so much of the power and intelligence contained in the universal being that it seems to belong to an entirely different and utterly inferior order of existence. The wave, too, since it forms itself only on the surface of the water gives no indication in its tiny stature of the tremendous depth and breadth and volume of water beneath it.

Consider that no wave exists by itself or for itself, that all waves are inescapably parts of the visible ocean. In the same way, no individual life can separate itself from the All-Life but is always a part of it in some way or other. Yet the idea of separateness is held by millions.

This idea is an illusion. From it springs their direct troubles. The work of the quest is simply this: to free the ego from its self-imposed limitations, to let the wave of conscious being subside and straighten itself out into the waters whence it came. The little wave is thus reconverted into the infinite Overself.

THERE IS no real ego but only a quick succession of thoughts which constitutes the "I" process. There is no separate entity forming the personal consciousness but only a series of impressions, ideas, images revolving around a common centre. The latter is completely empty; the feeling of something being there derives from a totally different plane—that of the Overself.

NG: Suppose someone can recognize that process to some degree. Is PB saying that when you reach that emptiness, you then have a feeling that there is something there despite the emptiness? Or is he saying that you recognize that your daily thoughts are really about nothing, and still you have, in that daily life, the feeling that there is really someone or some-thing and that feeling comes from the plane of the Overself?

ANTHONY: I think you said the right thing. When you investigate, when you're looking at your thoughts, you analyze and you see there's nothing there. You understand the illusory nature. You understand that fundamentally the ego is of an illusory nature. There's no reality there. But nonetheless there is the experience that you are real, that there's something real. And there you could, of course, distinguish between two things. On the one hand, existence, and on the other, the fundamentally "illusory" nature of the ego.

"The ego is monkey catapulting through the jungle:
Totally fascinated by the realm of the senses,
it swings from one desire to another,
one conflict to the next,
one self-centered idea to the next.
If you threaten it, it actually fears for its life.

Let this monkey go.
Let the senses go.
Let the desires go.
Let conflicts go.
Let ideas go.
Let the fiction of life and death go.
Just remain in the center, watching.

ANTHONY: Don't kid yourself. Don't come to me from the point of view that the ego doesn't exist, because it's been around as long as the Overself' has been projecting itself, manifesting itself through some kind of a life.

The residue of all that living becomes a tendency which you're going to find is perhaps not a permanent entity, but good enough to drive you up a wall for the next indefinite number of incarnations.

If you think you're going to enter into the arena of spiritual struggle and quest without having a real good idea of what's going on with your ego, you're in for trouble.

Only the few to whom philosophy grants her earned favours, find it out and know it by its true name.

The rest regard it under the limited aspect of a particular personality.

When they employ the word ‘self’ they do not usually refer it to anything beyond this physical being who stands before them in flesh and blood plus his little psychological collection of bitter‑sweet memories and transient moods, hot desires and cold fears.

It is within such small limits that they confine the meaning of this term. But the man who has come to genuine self‑knowledge knows what he really is over and above this named embodied individual; hence he may aptly adopt the expressive term ‘Overself when referring to it.

Theologians probably mean this when they speak of the ‘soul’.

But as our concept is as radically different from theirs in some ways as it is roughly similar to it in others, and particularly as it is not a theological theme for us, we prefer to call it the Overself.

The person is only a projection from the Overself as a dream‑figure is a projection from the mind of a dreamer. It is only a dependent creature which has forgotten its origin and now imagines itself to be the real ‘I’.

And then that leaves you with your real inner being, your true inner "I." In other words, you have to dismiss all these vagaries, fantasies, thoughts, memories, selections from your past, anticipations of your future, expectations—you want me, to go down the list?

You have to remove all that, in order to identify with it. Or, in other words, you stop thinking. Now I'm sure after this you'll think much more!

When there is no more thinking, concept forming, which is concerned with creating an artificial object—whether your inner self or your outer self doesn't matter—then the inwardness or the principle that you are, which is illuminating or shining in you, is what you really are.

That is, so to speak, always there. But you're not aware of it because you're preoccupied with the images, not with the light which is illuminating those images. If you could temporarily stop those images, then there would be just a light shining, and you would know that "this is what I am."

Then the images resume. Now it is possible for the images to go on and to still hold an identity with the light which illuminates the images, and then one could say, "I'm identified with that light and not with the images."

Thus the witness‑self walks through this world incognito. Only the few to whom philosophy grants her earned favours, find it out and know it by its true name.

The rest regard it under the limited aspect of a particular personality. When they employ the word ‘self’ they do not usually refer it to anything beyond this physical being who stands before them in flesh and blood plus his little psychological collection of bitter‑sweet memories and transient moods, hot desires and cold fears.

It is within such small limits that they confine the meaning of this term. But the man who has come to genuine self‑knowledge knows what he really is over and above this named embodied individual; hence he may aptly adopt the expressive term ‘Overself when referring to it.

Theologians probably mean this when they speak of the ‘soul’. But as our concept is as radically different from theirs in some ways as it is roughly similar to it in others, and particularly as it is not a theological theme for us, we prefer to call it the Overself.

The person is only a projection from the Overself as a dream‑figure is a projection from the mind of a dreamer. It is only a dependent creature which has forgotten its origin and now imagines itself to be the real ‘I’.

The touch of grace can be felt in an unmistakable manner but only after a man has been humbled chastened and made lowly.

When he finds that the net results of self‑help on the secret path are often doubtful in value and sometimes even dangerous in result through the pursuit of an erroneous course; when he dis­covers his own weakness after many a futile attempt to break his bad habits or to enlighten the darkness of his passage through life; when in short he feels that he cannot help himself any more, the time has arrived to call on an outside source for such help.

The gracious current of a stronger power than his own must be introduced into his inner life.

But it can only be introduced if he calls on it, if he aspires towards it and if he gives his devotion to it.

The basis of attraction between those who seek and that which gives is and must be faith and love.

All the way from the aspirant’s initial dream to his final achievement, he must resolutely resolve to stand or fall by his faith that this higher Self truly exists and that its realization is the hidden purpose of his incarnation.

ANTHONY: Ah, you're catching on. The ego doesn't forgive anyone. How often have you spontaneously forgiven someone who has hurt you deeply? Can you count the times? Well, that's how often you were enlightened.

DB: It doesn't seem like the ego's capable of doing anything except holding a grudge.

ANTHONY: You're catching on. Get your ego out of the way, then something in you can forgive.

THERE ARE THREE things man needs to know to make him a spiritually educated man: the truth about himself, his world, and his God. The mystic who thinks it is enough to know the first alone and to leave out the last two, is satisfied to be half-educated.

(v13, 20:4.95 and Perspectives, p. 257) Paul Brunton

ANTHONY: The word self is not capitalized, right? The truth about that uncapitalized self is that it is illusory, that you have to realize the non-existence of the ego. But even with that in-sight, with that understanding, you're still only one-third of the way. The next thing is to understand the nature of the World-Idea. Then, the third thing is the identification with your I AM, with your God.

So, the mystic comes to the realization that both the ego and the world that that ego perceives are illusory. That's the first realization as a mystic—the illusory nature of the ego and the concomitant world. Then you have to investigate the Idea of the world that's given to you, and when you do, you find out something about the World-Idea. That would be the second level. And the third level would be your I AM, the God within you. I'm just summarizing what has already been said.

To 'look within' doesn't mean to look for something really amazing to happen. To look for the states of consciousness to change. That's not what look within means. Have any of you looked within like that? I've spent so many hours looking within that way - not thousands, tens of thousands of hours looking within. And I was looking ... the same way we look outside. You know, like we're looking for something. And so you look inside. It's a great teaching, but then what do you do? You tend to look for stuff. Look for really groovy spiritual stuff to happen. Right? It's the same looking. It's not really different than looking for a million bucks, or a hot looking guy or gal or success. It's just looking for inner stuff. And there's a world of inner things and experiences, just like there's an outer world of things to look for.

But the inner world, it's not any more real or significant then the outer world. So to look within doesn't mean that, to look within in a way that you're looking for something. Looking for a treasure. It means to go to the root. And the root is the looking itself.

To turn within is to turn to that which is looking. So that we find out for ourselves that there isn't anybody that's looking! Looking is looking. There isn't someone there called 'me' that's behind awareness that's aware. Awareness is aware. It's the opposite: I'm not aware; awareness is aware of me. And this is quite a shock when you really come upon it!

This is really 'one without a second' as Ramana (Maharshi) used to say. That the self is one without a second. Without a second means: nothing behind it. No deeper return to go to. You've returned to your natural state. In Zen we used to call it 'taking the backward step.' We (generally) want to take the forward step: to pursue, to seek, to find. But the backward step is very simple ... return to what you are. Till that flash of recognition dawns, that awareness itself is what you are. Just like the flash of lightning in an empty sky - a spontaneous flash!

The easiest thing in spirituality is for it to become complex, instead of simple. But this is a very simple thing which is why it can penetrate so deeply. So quickly. So immediately.